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Now if you try to draw the
diagrams or structural formulas of these two compounds you will easily
get
H H H H H H H
| | | | | | |
H-C-H H-C-C-C-C-C-C-H
| | | | | | |
H H H H H H H
methane hexane
Each carbon atom, you see, has its four hands outstretched and duly
grasped by one-handed hydrogen atoms or by neighboring carbon atoms in
the chain. We can have such chains as long as you please, thirty or more
in a chain; they are all contained in kerosene and paraffin.
So far the chemist found it east to construct diagrams that would
satisfy his sense of the fitness of things, but when he found that
benzene had the compostion C_{6}H_{6} he was puzzled. If you try to draw
the picture of C_{6}H_{6} you will get something like this:
| | | | | |
-C-C-C-C-C-C-
| | | | | |
H H H H H H
which is an absurdity because more than half of the carbon hands are
waving wildly around asking to be held by something. Benzene,
C_{6}H_{6}, evidently is like hexane, C_{6}H_{14}, in having a chain of
six carbon atoms, but it has dropped its H's like an Englishman.


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